This specification relates to assisting the authoring of posts to an asymmetric social network.
An asymmetric social network is a social network in which a first member's relationship to a second member is not necessarily the same as the second member's relationship to the first member. Since the character of the social interaction between members in a member network can be defined in accordance with the nature of the relationship between those members, a first member in an asymmetric social network may interact with a second member in ways that differ from the social interaction provided for the second member to interact with the first member.
For the sake of comparison, in a symmetric social network, related members necessarily share the same relationship with one another. Examples of such symmetric social networks include FACEBOOK, LINKEDIN, and MYSPACE, where two or more members establish bidirectionally equivalent “friend” or other relationships generally using an invitation/response protocol that effectively requires the consent of both members to the relationship. Such bidirectionally equivalent relationships provide the same social interaction possibilities to the related members.
In contrast, without relationships being constrained to bidirectional equivalency, asymmetric social networks provide differing social interaction possibilities to members. An example of such an asymmetric social network is TWITTER, where a first member may be a follower of a second member without the second member necessarily being a follower of the first. Indeed, in many asymmetric social networks, a second member need not even know a first member's identity even though the first member has a relationship to the second member.
In some implementations, asymmetric social networks limit the size of members' posts to the network. Such asymmetric social networks, also referred to as “micro-blogs,” generally limit the size of a post to the size of a Short Message Service (SMS) or other text messaging standard message. Such standards are designed for use with mobile handsets, where communications bandwidth and input/output capabilities are more limited than in desktop computers with a high speed data connection.